“from the celebrated writers of Torment: Tides of Numenera”

I mean, even if his story checks out there’s no way I can forgive “giving money to a shitposting group”.

Well, Luckey is already part of a lawsuit by ZeniMax that insinuates that Oculus stole proprietary code from ZeniMax in order to develop the Rift, and “Facebook elects to cover themselves by throwing Luckey under the proverbial bus” isn’t even that improbable of a legal strategy.

This seems like a really light holiday season for games for me. Only things that strike me as an immediate “buy close to launch” are Dishonored 2 and Civ VI (and like all Civs, VI will likely take an expansion or two to hit its stride.)

The solution to this is similar to the solution to most of the problems with Steam: More human-driven moderation, less crowdsourcing or automation.

I did it one year on a lark, and some of the kids got really excited to pull a Twinkie (or hostess cupcake) out of the bowl so I keep putting Twinkies in there among the other options, in hopes of recapturing that bit of Halloween magic.

Would you believe I originally wrote “pickles” there and changed it to “twinkies” on a wrong edit? Fried pickles are great, fried twinkies are not.

I had a deep fried twinkie at the State Fair back in 2002, and I haven’t really wanted to have another one since. Nothing wrong with the humble twinkie (I give them out on Halloween sometimes), but I don’t think it’s a thing that’s improved by cooking it. All I could think when eating the deep fried twinkie was “I…

Cool. I still play Duck Hunt in 480i sometimes.

I don’t have a PS4 or an Xbox One, but am I alone in thinking that the base models offer a more compelling value proposition than the spiffier ones? Things like VR, 4K, and HDR just aren’t things I can bring myself to care about. The people who are liable to be convinced by the promise of technology probably already…

This is basically a question of “do older titles get 4k patches or not” since if a game came out close to the PS4's launch window, it’s not like “now you can play in 4k” is going to get people to go back and buy copies of FIFA 15, Battlefield 4, or Knack. So I doubt you’re going to take anything out of the vault to…

It sort of feels like Sony is judging the “I’m going to buy a new GPU because I can’t run the latest game on Ultra” folks by the volume of their online commentary not their actual numbers (I buy a new GPU mostly when I can’t play the latest game at all.)

Took me 1.5 playthroughs to determine how I felt about Fallout 3. Eventually decided I hate almost everything about it except the atmosphere it cultivates when you’re all alone wandering ruins/wastes (these opportunities are all too few since there’s stuff to fight everywhere.)

I mean, this one should be completely obvious. If your game can (and should, sometimes) have male characters who are old, fat, scarred, disabled, unrealistically muscular, or rock monsters then your game can (and should, sometimes) have female characters who are old, fat, scarred, disabled, unrealistically muscular,…

This is kind of how advertising works everywhere else though isn’t it? If you’re an established name, you can do stuff without displeasing your advertisers because people are tuning in for the name (you have the power in this relationship). If you’re not a big name though, the advertisers have the power and since they…

That Youtube allowed people to get paid for talking about literally anything they wanted to talk about is kind of an anomaly in the history of advertising. That big companies don’t want to be associated with nonsense like “here’s why one race is just better than all the others” is hardly surprising.

All marketing is misleading, but to actually prove advertising is “false” is extremely difficult. I get that people feel bad when they are manipulated by misleading advertising (this is the purpose of advertising), but it’s probably illuminating to consider what actually constitutes “false advertising.”

I really think that things in pre-release trailers or streams ought to be treated as “these are things that we hope to have in the final version” and not “these are things we are promising will be in the final version.” Game development in essence consists of triage between three lists: 1) Stuff you absolutely need in…

I miss when Fallout knew how to deal with its silliness (inherent or introduced) by either taking it seriously enough that it turned into a point about something (e.g. all of Old World Blues) or just threw it away immediately after it happened leaving the character to wonder if that was just a hallucination (e.g. the…

You could have said approximately the same thing about Bioshock Infinite when people voiced concerns before it was released, and we saw how that turned out.